5 ms·

I see a lot of people talking about how the site sells stuff well, but nothing about how well it gets you what you want. Ignore for the moment the counterfeit

I see a lot of people talking about how the site sells stuff well, but nothing about how well it gets you what you want. Ignore for the moment the counterfeit issues, because those are not a "site" problem. I still routinely fail to get what I search for. And then find it i. The "also bought" of whatever they do send me. Shipping times either lie more often than not, or are "true" after a seemingly arbitrary number of days between now and when it ships. Anything that is deeply categorized (prime day. Prime now, Restaurants, etc) loses your filtering all the time. This past prime day I had to search through their pages of deals by hand because their search just failed. This might well sell a lot of stuff...but like a news article that 8s broken up into multiple pages to seve me more ads, it is not good at what I want. Other forces (network effect) keep me there.

toast0 8y ago
I've come to the realization that Amazon is very good at optimizing, but what they're optimizing for is not what I would optimize for and may be less than obvious. Sort by price for example clearly does something, but it's not sorting by price, especially if you've filtered down to a single merchant already.
- DougWebb 8y ago
  I think that price, in the context of a site like Amazon's, deserves one of those "Wrong things developers believe about X" pages. Any given item in Amazon's database (where 'item' == 'something that has its own page') can have multiple variants on color, size, and other varieties. Each variant may have its own price. So if you want to sort items by price, which price do you use?
  - notatcomputer68 8y ago
    Cheapest usable variation that satisfies the query. E.g. if I search for a computer it should pick the variation with the cheapest cpu, not the one with bring-your-own-cpu
    - camtarn 8y ago
      You assume that the system has a notion of 'a computer', let alone 'a cpu'. I occasionally dealt with the Amazon catalogue. It's a great example of 'garbage in, garbage out'. This is also the reason I never bought computer parts on Amazon, even when I got a staff discount.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Any given item in Amazon's database (where 'item' == 'something that has its own page') can have multiple variants on color, size, and other varieties. Each variant may have its own price. So if you want to sort items by price, which price do you use? Use the lowest price, but include filtering options to exclude items based on the criteria that makes them different (e.g. show only Small shirts that are Pink or Yellow), and use the lowest price of the items matching the filters.
  - toast0 8y ago
    Ideally, I'd like it to sort based on the options I've narrowed by. I've come to realize it usually sorts based on the lowest used price for something that bins into the same item. Which is fairly unhelpful most of the time -- sort low to high results in either things that are generally less expensive, or things that are generally subject to super sketchy price manipulation by 3rd party sellers, even when I've declared I want to buy new, from amazon only.
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    I believe the road to UX hell is paved with "we want to be a marketplace". Even for a single SKU, Amazon will often stock the same item as new/used/refurb, from several sellers, at a whole galaxy of prices. This means there is no lone price to sort by, because you can't start with asking the user "Are you okay with a used one? Will you trust Acme Reseller Ltd as a merchant?".
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Somehow it must be profitable, and is presumably intentional as they obviously fail at the most basic stuff and have done for years. They didn't always though. Search for a product, find 156 results. Sort by rating or price and it's now often something absurd like 6 results. Where did the rest go? No manager or dev ever noticed this when it's now impossible to shop there and not notice this? This seems like a great whiteboard interview question in our strange alternate timeline "how would you sort a list without losing well over 90% of the list?" Go back to the original search, tediously wade through the crap and realise none at all of these are the actual item you tried to find. Randomly click around a few of the shitty products shown. Find the actual product, often from the actual manufacturer with thousands of reviews, in the "customers who viewed this also viewed" or "customers eventually bought" lists. Question your sanity. Go back and check search. Nope, the actual item isn't there in the primary search at all. Just the shit. Fortunately for me at least, there aren't enough other forces to keep me there and I now mostly shop elsewhere. Sometimes it would be annoyingly easy to just Amazon it, but they're not even cheapest or fastest any more.
notahacker 8y ago
The network effect keeping people there is the key bit. Other websites might be easier to navigate but they don't have the range, don't have the reviews, often admit they have no stock, usually cost a little more... not to mention how many people are signed up for Prime. It's not just suboptimal search and categorization, which is a difficult problem across a product range as large and changing as Amazon's (but would be considered intolerably bad on virtually any other ecommerce platform, except possibly eBay). It's also deliberately making choices other websites could never get away with, like sticking banner ads for a third party website right above its additional product recommendations. Someone will have done the calculations on that and figured they make more from the clicks than they lose from people not coming back to Amazon though. Probably the same goes for any product page refresh/reorganization clean enough to make users wonder if they're still on Amazon...
Nition 8y ago
Not to mention the continuing lack of a decent weighted "order results by by user rating."

toast0 8y ago

I've come to the realization that Amazon is very good at optimizing, but what they're optimizing for is not what I would optimize for and may be less than obvious. Sort by price for example clearly does something, but it's not sorting by price, especially if you've filtered down to a single merchant already.

DougWebb 8y ago
I think that price, in the context of a site like Amazon's, deserves one of those "Wrong things developers believe about X" pages. Any given item in Amazon's database (where 'item' == 'something that has its own page') can have multiple variants on color, size, and other varieties. Each variant may have its own price. So if you want to sort items by price, which price do you use?
- notatcomputer68 8y ago
  Cheapest usable variation that satisfies the query. E.g. if I search for a computer it should pick the variation with the cheapest cpu, not the one with bring-your-own-cpu
  - camtarn 8y ago
    You assume that the system has a notion of 'a computer', let alone 'a cpu'. I occasionally dealt with the Amazon catalogue. It's a great example of 'garbage in, garbage out'. This is also the reason I never bought computer parts on Amazon, even when I got a staff discount.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Any given item in Amazon's database (where 'item' == 'something that has its own page') can have multiple variants on color, size, and other varieties. Each variant may have its own price. So if you want to sort items by price, which price do you use? Use the lowest price, but include filtering options to exclude items based on the criteria that makes them different (e.g. show only Small shirts that are Pink or Yellow), and use the lowest price of the items matching the filters.
- toast0 8y ago
  Ideally, I'd like it to sort based on the options I've narrowed by. I've come to realize it usually sorts based on the lowest used price for something that bins into the same item. Which is fairly unhelpful most of the time -- sort low to high results in either things that are generally less expensive, or things that are generally subject to super sketchy price manipulation by 3rd party sellers, even when I've declared I want to buy new, from amazon only.
- hakfoo 8y ago
  I believe the road to UX hell is paved with "we want to be a marketplace". Even for a single SKU, Amazon will often stock the same item as new/used/refurb, from several sellers, at a whole galaxy of prices. This means there is no lone price to sort by, because you can't start with asking the user "Are you okay with a used one? Will you trust Acme Reseller Ltd as a merchant?".

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

Somehow it must be profitable, and is presumably intentional as they obviously fail at the most basic stuff and have done for years. They didn't always though. Search for a product, find 156 results. Sort by rating or price and it's now often something absurd like 6 results. Where did the rest go? No manager or dev ever noticed this when it's now impossible to shop there and not notice this? This seems like a great whiteboard interview question in our strange alternate timeline "how would you sort a list without losing well over 90% of the list?" Go back to the original search, tediously wade through the crap and realise none at all of these are the actual item you tried to find. Randomly click around a few of the shitty products shown. Find the actual product, often from the actual manufacturer with thousands of reviews, in the "customers who viewed this also viewed" or "customers eventually bought" lists. Question your sanity. Go back and check search. Nope, the actual item isn't there in the primary search at all. Just the shit. Fortunately for me at least, there aren't enough other forces to keep me there and I now mostly shop elsewhere. Sometimes it would be annoyingly easy to just Amazon it, but they're not even cheapest or fastest any more.

notahacker 8y ago

The network effect keeping people there is the key bit. Other websites might be easier to navigate but they don't have the range, don't have the reviews, often admit they have no stock, usually cost a little more... not to mention how many people are signed up for Prime. It's not just suboptimal search and categorization, which is a difficult problem across a product range as large and changing as Amazon's (but would be considered intolerably bad on virtually any other ecommerce platform, except possibly eBay). It's also deliberately making choices other websites could never get away with, like sticking banner ads for a third party website right above its additional product recommendations. Someone will have done the calculations on that and figured they make more from the clicks than they lose from people not coming back to Amazon though. Probably the same goes for any product page refresh/reorganization clean enough to make users wonder if they're still on Amazon...

Nition 8y ago

Not to mention the continuing lack of a decent weighted "order results by by user rating."